News

The Canadian Computing Competition is in just over a month! Once again,
a mock CCC has been prepared for individuals wishing to get additional
practice for the CCC.

The first mock CCC this year will run during the weekend of January 19th.
The junior and senior divisions do not share any problems, so
you can participate in both if you want additional practice! The junior
contest is not rated, but the senior contest is rated.

We expect all contestants to write the mock CCC under real CCC conditions.
Please read the rules on the contest page to ensure that you are in compliance.
In particular, we would like to remind all contestants that you may not use
any pre-written code.

Once again, congratulations to the winners this year. An email has been sent regarding your awards.

Editorials to problem statements will be posted within the next two months.

We hope that you enjoyed the contest and hope to see you again next year!

We're excited to invite you to participate in the GlobeX Cup!

The contest will take place on December 15-16 for a 24-hour window. Once you enter the contest, you will have 3 hours to solve the designated problem statements. It will be split into two divisions of increasing difficulty, with more than $1000 in prizes awarded to the top competitors.

Contest

There are two different divisions featuring problem difficulties from elementary to advanced. To determine which division suits you the best, try the junior sample and the senior sample.

Registration

Please fill out this form in order to register for the contest and be eligible for prizes.

Details

We're excited to invite you to Another Contest 3, the third contest in the Another Contest series!

After seeing the second contest be run, we're adding a fourth problem to the contest and shifting the difficulty
curve to be more friendly for less experienced participants.
You can see the full parameters of the contest on the contest page.

We're excited to invite you to Another Contest 2, the second contest in the Another Contest series!

After seeing the first contest be run, we're changing up the format a little bit to make the contest experience more pure.
Firstly, we're making the contest rated for everyone who opens the contest. Secondly, the scoreboard will be hidden
for the duration of the contest. You can see the full parameters of the contest on the contest page.

We'll also be tuning the difficulty of Another Contest 2 to be lower than the difficulty of Another Contest 1.

This is the first of a series of blog posts about the task `meetings' from IOI18. It is also available in a contest that will take place in conjunction with these posts.

We chose this problem as an experiment to see whether we can present a single problem in a way that it covers a lot of useful knowledge for a contest related topic. In this aspect, meetings is a great task in that it starts with dynamic programming, then moves into range queries and tree constructions, and finally, finishes it off with geometric data structures.

Furthermore, the setting of meetings is as classical as a data structure problem can get: you get a static array, and you query about some statistic on its subintervals. This is a setting that has been viewed as "completely understood" by most competitors who aim for top 40 or higher at the IOI since around 2005. However, this problem was given, and had 0 solvers. I've also heard several past contestants who placed in the Top-3 at IOIs refer to this problem as "Godly", so that's another reason to discuss it in more details.

In short, the ideas underlying meetings are extremely novel, especially given how well understood the topic is. Also, if mechanically you can solve meetings in 2 hours reliably, you shouldn't have trouble with most data structural topics.